How to Use Twitter to Share Blog Content

Sharing your blog content is the name of the game in developing thought leadership on Twitter. Believe it or not, when marketing via thought leadership, the goal is to give away your information and your ideas. You can use Twitter to share your content in two ways: by hand or automatically.

Follow these basic steps to manually share your content, such as a blog post:

Create and publish your content.

Copy the content’s URL and switch to HootSuite. Paste your URL in the Shorten URL text box, and click the Shrink button.

Alternatively, copy the post’s URL and go to your favorite URL-shortener website. Shorten your URL, and then switch over to your favorite Twitter app and paste the shortened URL in the message window.

Create a new tweet and type New post: followed by the headline of your content.

Copy and paste the headline if you have to. Make sure that the whole tweet is around 110 characters long so that people can retweet it.

Using tweets to share your blog posts or other content isn’t actually hard, but it can get tedious, especially if you have ten other things pulling you in different directions when you’re supposed to be promoting yourself. In that case, you may want to use the automated method.

To send automated tweets to share your blog posts or other content, follow these steps:

Create a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed.

All blogging platforms natively offer RSS feeds as a way for you to syndicate the content you post on your blog. You can also set up an RSS feed with Google FeedBurner for free.

You can either register your e-mail and a password, or use OpenID if you already have an account.

OpenID consists of a login name and password that you’ve created elsewhere, but that you can use on over 50,000 different sites. You may find OpenID especially useful because you don’t have to remember a lot of different passwords.

Authenticate yourself with Twitter.

You can authenticate yourself through the use of your Twitter username and password, or you can use the OAuth process.

OAuth works by sending you to Twitter from another Web site (Twitterfeed in this case). You authenticate yourself in Twitter if you aren’t signed in at the time and allow (or deny) access to the application so that it can connect to your Twitter account. Although Twitterfeed is a trustworthy service, the advantage of using OAuth is that you don’t have to share your password with Twitterfeed.

Allowing Twitterfeed to connect to your Twitter account makes it possible for it to automatically post on your Twitter account, pulling content from your blog through your blog’s RSS feed.

Other Web apps still ask for your Twitter password. Most of them are honest and don’t do anything nasty to your Twitter account, but a couple have been known to hack a person’s account for nefarious purposes.

Adjust your Twitterfeed settings.

Twitterfeed offers a number of options to let you tweak your automated posts: